Last week, we sat down with Bart McGlothin and Christian Janoff from Cisco’s security team to discuss PCI Security for Retail to better understand “What is PCI Compliance?” and “How does that affect Retailers?”
As a quick re-cap: PCI Compliance is a 12-step process to secure credit cards. Any retailer that accepts credit card payments must be “PCI Compliant” (i.e., follow those 12 steps). Compliance is enforced by the Retailer’s acquiring bank (the financial institution that processes the credit card payments for the Retailer).
Q. So, we know that Retailers need to be PCI Compliant. How can Cisco help?
A. Cisco has a PCI design and implementation guide for merchants to use. It really stands alone in the industry because it provides holistic guidance in three key ways:
Shoes? Check. Computer gear? Check. Clothes? Flatware? Hot tubs with built-in TVs? Check, check, and check. There’s almost nothing these days that we don’t buy online. But there is one area where the local brick-and-mortar store still reigns supreme: grocery shopping.
When it’s time to stock the fridge, the vast majority of us still do it the old fashioned way. We trek out to the store, walk up and down the aisles, and fill up physical rather than virtual shopping carts. But just maybe, that’s about to change. A number of retailers are experimenting with online groceries, and a growing number of consumers are ready to buy.
These days, the generation of data has become almost as constant as breathing. With every click or swipe, today’s mobile, hyperconnected consumers exhale an ever-expanding trail of digital details, revealing troves of information about their wants, needs, interests, well-being, and aspirations.
All of that data offers great promise for retailers looking to know their customers in deep, new ways in order to provide carefully targeted products and services. But it is also a source of headaches. Those same retailers are wrestling with a complex new realm of Big Data analytics, where a deluge of information from new sources like video, mobile, and social media threatens to swamp their capacity for processing. That is, if they can properly access those new data streams in the first place.
Being a resident of San Francisco, one advantage of is the amount of shopping within walking distance. This year several retailers timed their store openings and remodel to coincide with the holiday season shopping, which is expected to grow 4.1 percent over last holiday season, according to National Retail Federation.
These retailers understand they are competing against “showrooming” with E-commerce only retailers and consumer uncertainties over the economy. Many have developed unique shopping experiences to attract customers and here are some that stood out for me this holiday season before I head over to New York for the NRF 2013 Convention in January.
Uniqlo is a Japanese based international fashion retailer which opened its San Francisco store this October with great fanfare, including enlisting Japanese YouTube feline star Maru to promote their San Francisco store opening.
Some of the things that stood out for me at the store are:
Please register now join us on November 13th at 10:00am PT for the next installment of our retail webcast series.
Titled “Attract Shoppers and Compel Them to Buy: New Interactive Technologies to Engage Omnichannel Consumers”, this webcast will be hosted by Peggy Casey, Cisco global retail marketing manager. We will discuss how retailers can attract omnichannel shoppers to complete the sale through video and collaboration technologies,
In this webcast, you will learn how to: Read More »
